To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders

For more than forty years no one has been a more persistent student of the ideology of the American Revolutionary generation than Bernard Bailyn. His Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" (1967), served as my entrée to his ideas and it remains a masterwork. In it he made the case that the nation's founders were radicals with a difference, committed to an ideology predicated on the radical social and political thought of the English Civil War and emphasizing the rights of the citizens and opposition to the abuse of authority. It was a breath of fresh air when I first read the book in graduate school in the early 1980s. "To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders" offers something of a coda to that seminal book. It is a fine work overall, but one that offers little that is new beyond his earlier efforts. It is, however, a wonderful short work that offers insight into discrete aspects of the revolutionary world of the founders. In "To Begin the World Anew," really a collection of five essays prepared over several years, Bailyn continues to emphasize the power of the republican ideology to shape the course of history and lays out these themes in discussions of the American revolution as a creative enterprise, Thomas Jefferson and the paradox of freedom and slavery, Benjamin Franklin in Paris, the power of the "Federalist Papers," and the role of American revolutionary ideals on other democratic efforts worldwide. As always, Bailyn is fascinated by the delta that always exists between the ideal motivating action and the less than perfect implementation of it. Accordingly, the knife-edge dichotomy between the argument for the Constitution as a means of creating a stable and productive nation is balanced against very real concerns for the rights of individuals. Bailyn explicitly probes this problem in his essay on the "Federalist Papers" but also does so in his other essays in this volume. In general, "To Begin the World Anew" is a respectable restatement of ideas previously well expressed in Bailyn's writings. If one wants to read only one work by Bernard Bailyn for a sense of his thought on the Revolutionary era, however, the appropriate book remains "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution."

While not groundbreaking or monumental, To Begin the World Anew is still a nice little book that offers some keen insights into the American Revolution, particularly at Bailyn's familiar level of ideas. Perhaps better than any other living historian (at least that I've read), Bailyn is particularly good at fleshing out themes. If there's a single historical theme to this work, it's the contrast, and sometimes competition, between idealism and realism, between the lofty ideas that animated the Revolution and putting them into practice in a way that works. The theme of the book, however, Bailyn's reason for writing it is to encourage a continued examination of the nation's founding.Bailyn opens with an essay on provincialism. America, he argues, was a provincial backwater, distant from more cosmopolitan Europe but still somewhat connected to continental culture. Hence, America was more receptive to experimental and new political ideas. Bailyn uses, to wonderful effect, the homes of the period as well as portraits to highlight these contrasts between Americans and Europeans. From there, Bailyn offers two essays: one on Jefferson and the other on Franklin. In both, the idealism-realism dichotomy is present. For Jefferson, it is in the sphere of domestic politics and institutions (and, indeed, within his very character). Bailyn uses Franklin to show how it played out in foreign policy; he also includes European portrayals of Franklin in art to show how he was received there.The fourth essay is on The Federalist, about the context of its writing by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay and particularly about how the papers have been used over the centuries by the Supreme Court--ever increasingly, as it turns out. (The essay on the same topic in Bailyn's Faces of Revolution is much better.) The final essay completes the trajectory of the book; where things began with American provincialism, they end with American constitutionalism and related ideas fanning out into Europe (and Latin America). While this last essay gives the book a nice sense of closure, it is the weakest of the lot and does little beyond drop the names of Europeans who were writing about American political ideas and adopting--or trying to--them in their native countries.Overall, this is a solid collection of essays that contributed to my understanding of the period. It is a worthwhile read.

Historical research of the highest quality is frequently driven by a determination to answer questions of compelling importance. That is especially true of this volume in which Bailyn offers five separate but related essays which, together, examine a theme which its subtitle suggests: the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders." In his Preface, Bailyn identifies two convictions which remain constant throughout all five chapters: that those founders were "truly creative people, and that their creative efforts, the generation-long enterprise that elevated these obscure people from their marginal world to the center of Western civilization, were full of inconsistencies, logical dilemmas, and unresolved problems." With regard to questions of compelling importance, several can be summarized as follows:1. Which ambiguities "beset" Jefferson's career? What were their nature and impact?2. What is revealed by the "strange interplay between lofty idealism and cunning realism in Franklin's spectacular success in Paris"? Meanwhile, what can be learned from the interplay between Franklin and Adams?3. What is the significance of the fact that the authors of the Federalist papers struggled to reconcile "the need for a powerful, coercive public authority with the preservation of the private liberties for which the Revolution had been fought"? To what extent was such a reconciliation achieved?These are indeed compelling questions, ones which probably need to be asked today as our nation struggles to decide what its appropriate role is in the global community. After I read this book but before I began to formulate this review, I read Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents. In it, Stiglitz offers a heartfelt but rigorous examination of globalization, "the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies," asserting that it can and should be a force for good "and that it has the potential [in italics] to enrich everyone in the world, particularly the poor." However, given how globalization has been managed thus far, it should be rethought. Focusing primarily on the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) during the past decade, Stiglitz responds to the basic question: "Why has globalization -- a force that has brought so much good -- become so controversial?" I had Stiglitz's book in mind as I re-read Bailyn's. Granted, no one knew in the late-eighteenth century that the coalition of thirteen colonies (if it achieved independence) would one day become the single most powerful nation in the world. For me, the single greatest benefit of Bailyn's is his analysis of the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders," how they created a foundation on which the original thirteen colonies evolved over more than two centuries into the 50 states and their federal government which now, du

Introspective and well-written essays by Bernard Bailyn, as we have come to expect. Though his work is always five-star, this one is a bit more slow and lecture-sounding than his previous scholarly works, and, curiously, attempts to countermand the lecturey characteristic with various types of iconography. If you come away liking that sort of thing, or like history that is less lecturey, after reading this wonderful work by Bernard Bailyn, I would recommend you also try Norman Thomas Remick's rendition of "beginning the world anew" called "West Point: Character Leadership Education..." which cleverly posits the foundation of West Point as a metaphor for the foundation of the United States of America and untangles the founders' deeds and philosophy, particularly Thomas Jefferson's.

Bailyn has written a thoughtful treatise on some of the psyche of some of our founding fathers. Though this book is not quite on par with some of Bailyn's other work (such as The Ideological Origins of the American Revoluation), it is still fascinating read. Bailyn writes on several subjects and ties them together under his hypothesis that our nation's founding was accompanied by a series of contrasts. First, he writes about how the founders were provincials, relative to European society. Their provincial nature, posits Bailyn, helped the founders develop a pragmatic approach to life. He writes that one of the reasons that the Americans were able to reject some of what Europe considered unquestionable was due to the fact that Europeans generally rejected the Americans for their provincial nature. He also writes about some of the personal contrasts in the persona of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, Bailyn writes, hated slavery, but freed only a few of his personal slaves. At different times in his career, Jefferson worked to restrict the number of slave states and then worked to support the expansion of slave states. At times Jefferson was regarded as one of America's staunchest supporters of the free press. However, the same man also wrote that suppression of the press would do less damage than the press itself. Interestingly, Jefferson initially rejected the Constitution, before becoming one of its principal advocates. Though terribly fearful of powerful offices, Jefferson overstepped the bounds of his own presidency. Using these, and other, examples, Bailyn writes that our country was ultimately founded on contrasts. The founding fathers, fearful of the power of government, created a powerful government as well as forces to control that power. Not just the ideas of the founders were idiosyncratic, writes Bailyn, but also were the founders themselves. I highly recommend this book to thoughtful students of American history.